This city is beauty, unbreakable and amorous as eyelids, in the streets, pressed with fierce departures, submerged landings.

Let me declare doorways, corners, pursuit. Let me say standing here in eyelashes, in invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake in the tiny shops of untrue recollections. This brittle, gnawed life we lead. I am held, and held.

The touch of everything blushes me. Pigeons and wrecked boys, half-dead hours, blind musicians, inconclusive women (in bruised dresses), even the habitual grey-suited men with terrible briefcases. How come, how come I anticipate nothing as intimate as history.

Would I have had a different life: failing this embrace with broken things, iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracks in the brain? Would I know these particular facts: how a phrase scars a cheek, how water dries love out--this, a thought as casual as any second eviscerates a breath.

And this. We meet in careless intervals. In coffee bars, gas stations, in prosthetic conversations, lotteries, untranslatable mouths, in versions of what we may be. A tremor of the hand in the realization of endings, a glancing blow of tears on skin. The keen dismissal in speed.

// Dionne Brand